Last Saturday was a typical spring day in Pasadena. The sky was clear, the sun was shining, and a dry 90-degree heat was whipping up a brushfire in nearby Monrovia. But underneath a large white tent on Art Center College of Design’s Hillside Campus the graduating class of 2013 was fired up by a different force of nature. Dieter Rams was in the house.

Rams, the legendary industrial designer who spent three decades heading up design for the German company Braun is the man responsible for the creation of a wide range of iconic devices, including the ET22 Calculator, the T41 Radio, and the SK4 Music Center. He was here to receive an honorary doctorate of arts from the college and to deliver the graduation address.

Dieter Rams with Dr. Lorne M. Buchman, president, Art Center College of Design

Mark Breitenberg, special assistant to the president, looks on as a fan waits for an autograph from Dieter Rams

The excitement on campus was palpable, with many alumni returning to their alma mater just to hear what the man behind the “less, but better” approach and the “back to purity, back to simplicity” philosophy had to say to the newest generation of artists and designers. After being introduced by Karen Hofmann, chair of the college’s Product Design Department, as “a legend in the industrial design field and a design hero to many in the audience,” Rams delivered his address in his native German, which was translated live by an English-language interpreter. His address was equal parts cautionary, reflective, hopeful and forward-looking. Read more…

Imagine you are sitting in the top-floor boardroom of a major United States consumer products company and you are meeting one-on-one with the company’s executive in charge of sustainability. You have been to this facility many, many times before. Over seven years, you have met with executives in charge of finance, supply chains, manufacturing, product design, research and development, and marketing. Hundreds of meetings to listen, to learn, and to explore your new concepts for sustainable growth and beneficial innovation.

Together, you and the executive have shared data—lots of data. You know big-picture business issues facing this company and detailed chemistries of the products. You even know how many light bulbs are used to illuminate the enterprise worldwide, how much energy that consumes, how many light bulbs contain mercury, and how many people it takes to change a light bulb and what that costs….

Outside the giant plate-glass windows, tall granite-clad skyscrapers stand proudly in the sunshine. The Brazilian mahogany table is polished to a shine, and the high-backed leather chairs remind you of the important executive decisions made in this room, which can affect the lives of millions of people—for better or for worse. One might say you are here chasing the butterfly effect. Given the scale of this company, one small decision has the power to make a real difference for the economy, for people, and for the planet.

That is one reason you are here—scale. But you are also here for another reason—velocity. Many of the largest corporate enterprises in the world have come to realize the downside of the butterfly effect, the repercussions of modern business that are obviously damaging and too often unaccounted for—famously called externalities, such as carbon in the atmosphere, toxic materials, poisoned rivers, lost rain forests, and so on, with no end of this decline in sight. Many businesspeople realize this is not good business. They like to know what they are doing and to be able to account for it, but they feel like they are driving a car without a gas gauge or even, shall we say, a battery charge indicator? It makes them nervous. They also are like Olympic athletes who want to be on a safe, level playing field and who do not want to be left behind. They want to lead. Read more…

Wearable technology is going to change everything. Yes, it will change when, where, and how we “connect.” But, even bigger than that, it will reshape the way we find happiness—no longer looking for it in self help books or friends’ advice. Instead, in our search for answers and fulfillment, we will dive into the data our bodies and actions create. This will be the ultimate disruptive technology. But this can only happen with the help of designers.

“Disruptive technology” is one of those over-used phrases, teetering towards meaninglessness. It’s not that it’s a bad term; some of the most interesting phrases are used until they have been stripped of all depth and are nothing but a way to demonstrate being on-trend. (I’m looking at you “curated.”) Recently, though I heard a definition that resonated with me. Instead of thinking of disruptive technology as any new app that pops up, we might try and approach it as anything that fundamentally changes our core behaviors. On a small scale, wearable technology is already doing this. In five years’ time its integration into society will be ubiquitous.

Despite Heidegger’s assurances that our own actions are technology, most of us understand technology as something separate from our bodies. It is something we make, control, hold, and are disconnected from. But, to feel fulfilled, the growing societal shift towards a culture of constant connectivity and data worshipping has made us increasingly reliant and emotionally dependent on technology.

As we’ve entered a co-dependency with technology, we’ve grown more open to applying it internally and externally to our own bodies. Responding to this new market, a growing crop of wearable technologies have popped up, each with its own compelling promise on how they can modify our lives positively.

There is the IntelligentM, a digital wristband that alerts medical employees if they haven’t washed their hands well enough. Though it’s currently only being used in the medical world, it’s easy to foresee how it could move like Purell out of the medical community to the general population. Then there is Muse, a headband that connects to your brain so that you can play thought-controlled games. Similarly, the new Prius Bike, PXP which comes with a helmet that uses your brain to let you shift gears just by thinking about it. There are all sorts of fitness related wearable technologies dedicated to tracking your health and wellbeing, including Nike’s FuelBand, FitBit, and Jawbone Up. Read more…

Max Zahniser doesn’t usually make house calls. As a leader in sustainability and integrative, systems thinking he lends his expertise to wide ranging building projects and organizations. He promotes green practices on a national level and has been at the inception of advanced thinking in that arena.

Zahniser doesn’t just paint with a broad brush. Son of two psychologists, he knows more than most that “relationships matter.” When it comes to collaborations, he wisely encourages “enlightened self-interest rather than right or wrong.”

To give you a better idea of his philosophy Zahniser will tell you that systems thinking is his foundation for understanding the world. He rejects a fragmented, specialized worldview and ascribes to the dawning “Age of Integration,” anticipated decades ago by Buckminster Fuller and Lewis Mumford. In contrast to healthy interdependence, Zahniser sees Philadelphia as an example of “dispersed environmental initiatives.” His new Sustainability Nexus enterprise aims to pull that all together.

PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE

I asked Zahniser to pack up the best of his design insights and conceptual diagrams into a tool kit he could take to any neighborhood to foster grass roots green initiatives, so to speak. As with the famed “Powers of Ten” illumination of scale by Charles and Ray Eames, presumably, what can heal a neighborhood, can heal a city and so on. Read more…

Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City has seen several major disasters in recent memory, a fact that was not lost on the presenters at Thursday’s topping-out ceremony of the area’s new SeaGlass carousel. “This community, you cannot bring us down,” said Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, who spoke at the ceremony. “You can attack us, flood us… but we are about building and creating.”

Borough President Scott Stringer speaks at the SeaGlass topping-out ceremony.

The carousel, designed by New York firm WXY, will be the centerpiece of the newly redesigned Battery Park. Several speakers at the ceremony lauded it not just as a new neighborhood landmark and beautiful work of design, but as a symbol of the resilience and strength of a community that has endured both the 9/11 attacks and hurricane Sandy.

Attendees admired the completed exterior. Inside, banners were placed to indicate the scale of the carousel seats. Read more…

Following our site visit to Via Verde in New York City, we headed west to brisk yet sunny Chicago to Inspiration Kitchens – Garfield Park, submitted by its founder and sponsor, Inspiration Corporation Inc. The restaurant is located four miles west of the Chicago Loop in East Garfield Park, across the street from the 185-acre Garfield Park and one block from the Garfield Park Conservatory. Opened in 2011 the facility, located in one of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods, is a nonprofit, social enterprise that provides healthy, free meals to the working poor as well as workforce training.

The dining room of Inspiration Kitchens - Garfield Park, Chicago.  Photograph: Steve Hall, Hendrich Blessing

The restaurant is close to Garfield Park, Garfield Park Conservatory, and public transit.  Illustration: Wheeler Kearns Architects

View looking past the restaurant toward the loop.  Photograph: Bruner Foundation

Among the smallest of the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award finalists in size, Inspiration Kitchens – Garfield Park, like Congo Street Initiative and Via Verde, is a LEED Gold certified project and shares the intent of encouraging healthier urban living and sustainable development. During our two days on site, we met with Inspiration Corporation staff representatives from the community and city agencies, the design team, and program graduates to learn more about the project. We also sampled the food, enjoying three meals at the restaurant along with other diners. Read more…

Sport is among the most insistent reasons for large-scale architecture. Think of the Colosseum or Fenway Park, not to mention a new crop of Olympic venues every two years. Every society builds large-scale venues for sporting entertainment; only the purpose varies. While we’ve forsaken such diversions as public executions and mock sea battles we continue to build for baseball, football, soccer, or basketball using new specifications. Amidst this larger shift, from the trident and the net to the diamond and the catch, there are occasional continuities. Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of horseracing and the structures erected for its viewing. This specialty is finally given due attention by Paul Roberts and Isabelle Taylor in their intriguing new book, Racecourse Architecture.

The Hippodrome is one of the oldest of sporting forms. And while the Roman-built Leptis Magna may not be hosting the Libyan Triple Crown today, a number of racecourses can boast traditions of continuous use that put any other sport to shame. Chester Racecourse, which operates to this day, held its first races in 1539; the Grand Écuries at Chantilly were completed in 1736; the original York Racecourse Grandstand (they naturally have a larger one now) dates from 1756. Even comparatively youthful racecourses frequently boast architecture older than any extant American sporting venue, not to mention any worldwide soccer venue.

Racecourses continue to exercise a grip on the public imagination. This image might have drifted more in the direction of the corporate and the raffish in recent years but still manages to accommodate both staggering seediness and considerable gentility. HBO’s short-lived Luck featured a standard cast of racing degenerates. Joseph Bruno until recently held court over his seeming lifelong fiefdom of the New York Senate from the Saratoga Racecourse. Cary Grant met Ingrid Bergman at the racecourse in Notorious, seeking news of Nazi Claude Rains’ doings; Christopher Walken’s Max Zorin raced horses at Chantilly in A View to A Kill, which naturally Roger Moore had to investigate. My Fair Lady featured the “Ascot Gavotte”:

Every duke and peer is here

Everyone who should be here is here

What a smashing, positively dashing spectacle

The Ascot opening day

While today’s Alan J. Lerner would be unlikely to choose such a topic, Ascot continues to possess a distinct grandeur. And just as unglamorous racing events have not swept away swank ones, undistinguished racing architecture has happily failed to carry away many glorious examples of the form. Horseracing in the contemporary sense began to take form, unsurprisingly, under the aegis of those Stuart monarchs, who tended to possess enthusiasms for the divine right of kings and for fun in equal measure. Enthusiasm may have outstripped talent. James I was described by one historian as “the worst rider in the world” and it is rumored that Parliament once dispatched a group to request his return to government from racing. No wonder his grandson should want to rule without them. Read more…

As we enter a transition era that demands far greater resilience and sustainability in our technological systems, we must ask tough new questions about existing approaches to architecture and settlement. Post-occupancy evaluations show that many new buildings as well as retrofits of some older buildings, are performing substantially below minimal expectations. In some notable cases, the research results are frankly dismal [see “Toward Resilient Architectures 2: Why Green Often Isn’t”].

The trouble is that the existing system of settlement, developed in the oil-fueled industrial age, is beginning to appear fundamentally limited. And we’re recognizing that it’s not possible to solve our problems using the same typologies that created them in the first place. In a “far-from-equilibrium” world, as resilience theory suggests, we cannot rely on engineered, “bolt-on” approaches to these typologies, which are only likely to produce a cascade of unintended consequences. What we need is an inherent ability to handle “shocks to the system,” of the kind we see routinely in biological systems.

In “Toward Resilient Architectures 1: Biology Lessons” we described several elements of such resilient structures, including redundant (“web-network”) connectivity, approaches incorporating diversity, work distributed across many scales, and fine-grained adaptivity of design elements. We noted that many older structures also had exactly these qualities of resilient structures to a remarkable degree, and in evaluations they often perform surprisingly well today. Nevertheless during the last century, in the dawning age of industrial design, the desirable qualities resilient buildings offered were lost. What happened?

The fractal mathematics of nature bears a striking resemblance to human ornament, as in this fractal generated by a finite subdivision rule. This is not a coincidence: ornament may be what humans use as a kind of “glue” to help weave our spaces together. It now appears that the removal of ornament and pattern has far-reaching consequences for the capacity of environmental structures to form coherent, resilient wholes. Image: Brirush/Wikimedia

A common narrative asserts that the world moved on to more practical and efficient ways of doing things, and older methods were quaint and un-modern. According to this narrative, the new architecture was the inevitable product of inexorable forces, the undeniable expression of an exciting industrial “spirit of the age.” The new buildings would be streamlined, beautiful, and above all, “stylistically appropriate.” Read more…

As Neil Harbisson lifted a red sock up to the end of the narrow, black device extending from the back of his head, a note sounded. After a moment he set down the red sock and reached for a blue sock, this one playing a different note as he brought it to the sensor suspended over his forehead. Repeating the gesture several times, new notes sounded for each different sock - he was playing a “color concert”. Although Harbisson cannot see colors, the device attached to his head, known as an eyeborg, allows him to perceive them through the frequencies they emit, including many which are not perceptible to normal human eyes. The performance was a fitting end to the 2013 PSFK Conference, a day of talks, panels, and presentations centering on the latest in technology, design, and brand innovation.

Neil Harbisson performs a concert using his eyeborg and different colored socks.

Much of last week’s PSFK conference, which took place April 12^th at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, centered on the connections between humans and technology, and how advances in technology are changing how we relate to the world. Other major topics of the day were strategies for successful branding, and several plans to reshape New York City for the better in the coming years.

Harbisson, who in addition to his concert was also the day’s first speaker, explored the possibility of augmenting human senses with technology, similar to how he has done. He believes that, in a way, we are all handicapped in that our natural five senses do not allow us to perceive the full range of inputs from around us. Through the use of technology, our range of perception can be expanded and our awareness increased. His group, the Cyborg Foundation, works to help people augment their senses through technology, as well as advocating on behalf of cyborgs like himself.

Douglas Rushkoff discusses the phenomenon of “present shock.”

Read more…

The world around us is rich in imagination, beauty, connections, emotions, and anything else you may think of when you think of the designed environment. Yet the language we use to describe this fascinating gift to us, a gift shaped by designers, lacks the complexity and richness of our environment, that small part of the world we come in contact with every day, at every scale, from the smallest object to the teeming streets of a metropolis. This was the message of AFTERTASTE 2013, “The Atmosphere of Objects,” held at New York’s Parsons the New School for Design earlier in the spring.

The provocation for the symposium was delivered by author Akiko Busch, the first managing editor of Metropolis magazine and our contributing writer for two decades. When she read some odes to the physical world by the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, those of us gathered at the school’s auditorium were given a gift of language. Busch challenged us to write our own odes to the everyday objects we come in contact with. The hand-written odes poured in, proving the basic human need to connect, through language, with the things around us. Here are some of the odes we captured that day. What would your ode be about?

Two odes to the button

1.

Closes and envelopes, secure until not, and then again lost and re-found, re-adapted.
So simple and complex—I love the form, function, form.

2.

Like you washed up on the beach after years of tumbling with salt and sand. You hold me together. Keep me from falling apart.

Ode to a MetroCard

Swish, here to there and back again, the magic key that unlocks a space-time treasure. Without you I’m stuck in one place, for all time. You unlock me, my potential, my silent partner.

Ode to my pencil

My pencil (my sword?) has a core of LEAD that will last me years (or hours?) of words pouring out like magic.  But on its far end, the eraser top scolds.

Ode to my new bread knife

Hay bread knife, you are too good at your job. You ventilated my finger with a lot less effort than it takes to bisect a bagel.

Ode to a test tube

A world-class wine tester who never gets tired of trying drinks and never gets drunk.